Should Florida ban lab grown meat? 🧪

This month the Florida house approved a bill banning the sale or possession of lab grown meat.

Last week I was surprised listening to the 4 members of popular business/tech-billionaire podcast “All In” calling this ban irrational. They typically represent a broad spectrum of views politically, but they were unanimously against this ban, calling it regulatory capture by Florida’s $1B ranching industry and an attack on free markets.

Otherwise smart people fail to see that a laissez-faire approach to food tech permanently displaces defenseless staple foods via convenience and cost cutting, ultimately putting them in a high-end niche and making them forever inaccessible to large parts of the country.

The crowding out of staple foods like quality bread and butter by ultra-processed food is a key contributor to America’s unique chronic disease and obesity crises.

Why bread is dead & seed oils rule the land

Time and time again, novel food technologies (trans-fat margarine, seed oils, preservatives etc) are embraced by the free market, only to later be exposed as deeply detrimental to our health.

Even worse, tech-enabled foods crowd out the real thing, with pricing and convenience. This effect is why today in many parts of the country it is virtually impossible to purchase a loaf of organic sourdough bread.

Economists would refer to this crowding as “deflation”: a loaf of bread costs 1/4th the inflation-adjusted price of the past… But not all loafs are equal.

What’s really happened, is that the price of REAL bread has risen to infinity, because the price of “supermarket bread-product” has crowded it out.

(Even worse, you have to pay for an app to find a restaurant that cooks with butter)

Pandora’s lunchbox

Interventions like this ban are exactly the areas where government should intervene in markets.

No scientist can adequately model the effects of switching our population over from real to lab-grown protein. Staple foods like meat are too close to home to allow unchecked capitalism to accelerate.

As prices drop, and the taste-tech improves, a passable version of lab grown meat could very well turn real meat into a rustic delicacy of a bygone age.

We’ll lose all of the complexity and magic of nature, but since that is hard to quantify outside of “grams of protein and fat” brainwashed consumers are vulnerable to letting it slide.

Until we are confident that’s the future we want, we should keep the genie in the bottle and protect our last untainted American food source: beef 🐮